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but the backdrop only added to its impact. Holding the piece in his hands, Louis kissed her brow. ‘It is like you,’ he said, ‘clear and fine and unique.’ He set it down gently on the table, and immediately a shower of coloured diamonds spangled the white cloth. Louis’s face filled with astonished delight. Alienor smiled to see his response and thought that while he had given her all these rich and heavy things, her gift to him of captured light surpassed them all.
    ‘May I?’ Without waiting for consent, Abbé Suger picked up the vase in eager hands, his gaze frankly acquisitive. ‘Exquisite,’ he said. ‘I have never seen such fine workmanship.’ He ran his fingers over the carving in tactile delight. ‘See how clear it is, and yet it reflects all the colours of a cathedral window. Truly this is God’s work.’
    Alienor suppressed the urge to snatch it from him. Suger was a close friend of Archbishop Gofrid and she ought to be delighted by his admiration.
    ‘Abbé Suger is fascinated by such items,’ Louis said with a smile. ‘He has a fine collection at Saint-Denis, as you will see when we return to Paris.’
    Suger carefully replaced the vase on the trestle. ‘I do not make the collection for me,’ he said with a hint of rebuke, ‘but for the glorification of God through beauty.’
    ‘Indeed, Father.’ Louis flushed like a scolded boy.
    After one sharp glance, Alienor looked down. She had noticed how often Louis glanced at Suger, seeking approval and support. This man could be friend or foe and he had Louis at his beck and call. She would need to tread very carefully indeed.
    Later in the afternoon, as the sun cooled on the river and the Ombrière Palace drew on a mantle of deeper, slumbrous shadows, Louis prepared to return to his camp across the river. He had become more relaxed as the day wore on, and he was smiling as he took his farewell of Alienor, setting his thumb over the ring he had given her and kissing her cheek. His lips were silky and warm, and his fledgling beard was soft against her skin. ‘I will visit again tomorrow,’ he said.
    Something inside Alienor unclenched and opened. The notion of marrying him had begun to feel more solid – reality, rather than the cloudy haze of a dream. Louis seemed decent enough; he had been kind thus far and he was handsome. Matters could have been much worse.
    Embarking to his camp across a sunset river of sheeted gold, Louis raised his hand in farewell and Alienor returned the gesture with a half-smile on her lips.
    ‘Well, daughter,’ said Archbishop Gofrid, coming to stand at her side, ‘have your fears been allayed?’
    ‘Yes, Father,’ she replied, knowing it was what he wanted to hear.
    ‘Louis is a fine, devout young man. I am much impressed by him. Abbé Suger has tutored him well.’
    Alienor nodded again. She was still trying to decide whether Suger was ally or foe, no matter that he was Gofrid’s friend.
    ‘I am pleased you gave him the vase.’
    ‘Nothing else would match what he had brought to me,’ she said. She wondered if her tutor had brought out the vase from the depths of the treasury with that intention. She firmed her lips. ‘I am glad Abbé Bernard of Clairvaux was not among their number.’
    Gofrid raised his brows.
    Alienor grimaced. Twice the redoubtable Abbé Bernard had visited her father, on both occasions to harangue him about his support for the opposition during a papal schism. She had only been a small child on his first visit and vaguely remembered him patting her head. He had been as thin as a lance, and had smelled musty, like old wall hangings. The second time, when she was twelve, Bernard and her father had argued violently in the church at La Couldre. It had been at the start of her father’s illness, and Abbé Bernard, with his stabbing bony finger, blazing eyes and eloquent speech threatening the fires of hell, had brought her father to his knees at the altar, and claimed it was God’s